ICT across the curriculum

Following my previous blog post about using ICT in Literacy this post aims to cover the whole primary curriculum! Now, this is far too broad an area to put into one post, also there are far better informed bloggers and tweeters than me with websites which are designed to offer far more ideas. However I will simply share a few of my favourite websites, apps, tools and devices which can be used across a range of subjects. This has come about as part of a training session I ran for some Schools Direct students.

Padlet

Padlet is an on-line pin board. It’s free and perfect for collaborative learning across a range of subjects. You can simply share the URL with your class and they can all add thoughts, research, links, photos, etc to share with the class.

Alternatively, the children can use it as a very simple website of their own allowing them to build on-line research pages, like a mood-board or montage for DT ideas.

Socrative is a FREE web based service which allows you to write quizzes which can be shared with your class. The results are then collated into a spread sheet for you to get instant feedback. Brilliant for AfL, and lots of fun. You can also find Socrative quizzes which have already been made by other teachers.

Once I shared this with the students I was training, one of them then shared something similar they had been using with me. Kahoot is also free and web based but is even more visually appealing and simple to use.

Children and adults alike will love playing with YAKit on the iPad. It allows you to add an animated mouth to absolutely anything and record speech to make it come to life. Great fun and a brilliant way to encourage those less confident in speaking to the class. Fantastic for practising short dialogues also as you can have two objects speaking in the same scene.

P.E.

Get the children to film themselves and view it back to accelerate progress. We’ve long since used peer assessment to help children understand their strengths and weaknesses. Getting them to film themselves and watch the results has really helped my class, particularly in dance and gymnastics. This can be applied across the curriculum, as being able to see where we are going wrong enables you to put it right.

And finally a really great idea I got from @leah_moo is to use ‘Just Dance’ to teach dance routines, as PE warm ups or as a little light relief. To get you in the mood, here is the Macarena, hundreds more are available, many can be linked to topics and most are more current than this example!